Zup? Surfers' Slang Goes Mainsteam In 'Surfin'ary'

September 18, 1991|By Katherine Bishop, New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Since the 1959 movie Gidget introduced America to Hollywood's version of the Southern California surfing culture and Tom Wolfe came west in the '60s to write The Pump House Gang about ''the mystique, the mysterioso,'' the surfing culture has raced across the globe like a tsunami.

The phenomenon has spun off in so many directions that now Chanel models sashay down runways in sequined wet suits, sidewalk surfers, or skateboarders, zip around the Hermitage museum in Leningrad and children in Copenhagen who have never seen a wave worth riding wear surfing tank tops and Hawaiian print baggies.

Bumper stickers in Southern California read, ''I Brake for Brian Wilson,'' the leader of those surf-culture messiahs, The Beach Boys.

From all indications, it appears to be the historically perfect moment for The Surfin'ary: A Dictionary of Surfing Terms and Surfspeak,'' published last month by Ten Speed Press.

It was compiled and edited by Trevor Cralle (pronounced KRAW-lee), a native Californian who holds a degree in cultural geography from the University of California at Berkeley and describes himself as a surf linguist and lexicographer.

Cralle, who is 30 and has been an avid surfer since he was 14, spent six years gathering more than 3,000 surfing terms and phrases and researching how the jargon has evolved over the last three decades.

He said much of his field research consisted of sitting on a surfboard in the waters off California, Hawaii, Australia and other surfing hot spots and talking to his fellow surfers while they waited for the next wave.

But holding actual conversations with surfers is not always easy, even if one possesses, as Cralle does, sun-bleached hair and a suntan and arrives in a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle.

As his book points out, surfers are keen on abbreviated jargon, and in Santa Cruz, Calif., where he lives, they have achieved new proficiency in expressing themselves with minimal effort.

Thus the question ''Zup?'' for ''What's up?'' will usually be answered ''Nuch'' for ''Not much.''

Cralle has tried to trace the path of popular words that have traveled full circle, first adopted from popular culture by surfers for their own purposes, and then returned to the wider population as an intregal part of young people's lingo and played back in other mediums.

The most noted example is the surfer's exultant shout, ''cowabunga!''

According to Cralee's research, it was adapted from the 1950s children's program The Howdy Doody Show, where the character Chief Thunderthud cried out ''kawabonga!'' as a greeting.

Most recently, ''cowabunga!'' became the cry of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, connecting with the upcoming surfing generation through comic books and movies.

Cralle speculates that part of the popularity of surfing culture around the world is its close connection to the fantasy of Southern California as a place where the weather and the tans are always perfect, the cars are always convertibles and people are free to frolic in the ocean year-round.

But when words become popular enough to threaten the exclusionary with-it status of surfers, they often are discarded. Cralle said that ''cowabunga'' has lost ground among surfers to ''yabba-dabba-doo,'' picked up from the '60s cartoon show The Flintstones.

And he predicts that the cartoon character Bart Simpson's surfing exclamation of choice, ''Aye, carumba!'' will be next.

The influence of The Flintstones on the language of surfing also extends to the adoption of the names of its lovable but dopey characters - Fred and Wilma Flintstone and Barney Rubble - as derogatory terms for those who engage in hopelessly uncool behavior.

Thus the '60s put-downs ''ho-dad'' and ''kook,'' which became ''dork'' and ''geek'' in the '70s, followed by ''dweeb'' in the '80s, have now been replaced by ''barney'' and ''fred.''